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Listening to contemporary music one must maintain an open mind. To this writer’s mind, As I Write This, a new collection of music by Aaron Helgeson, satisfies on a number of counts. But not all the music carried me away into new creative landscapes.
Letters to Jackie
Helgeson’s starting points range from traditional Norwegian fiddle to Shakespeare to Debussy. But the collection opens with three evocative lieder inspired by something more recent. In “Once a While in Time,” commissioned for a project called “Letters to Jackie,” the composer compiles texts from letters written to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis following the assassination of John F. Kennedy. All the selections are references to time.
Tenor Ryan Townsend Strand, accompanied by pianist Karina Kontorovitch, brings out the Sondheim-ian Romanticism in Helgeson’s melodies. The songs reveal a musical strength of character, built up from snippets of text that reflect people’s emotions and gut memories: “As I write this…as we watched for more than three hours…Do you remember when we went, when we saw him…when I heard it was true?” Strand sings with a fluid ease that strengthens, by means of opposition, the evocation of trauma.
Woven through the music are elements of melody from the Willie Nelson-penned hit “Funny How Time Slips Away,” which is quoted directly at the end of the third song. The melody flows nicely with Helgeson’s own creations.
Time – and Again
The album’s longest piece, “A Long While,” features soprano Sharon Harms and a libretto of fragments of text adapted from the character Hermione from Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. The music too is fragmentary, discrete pieces of melody separated by empty spaces, and with sparse piano accompaniment. The texts evolve from melodically hesitant questions (“will I be better and be more…when will I weep?”) to statements, where the melody opens up. (“I’ll own the world, I’ll undo the world.”)
In the next section the singer asks a series of half-sensical, stichomythic “why” questions. Gertrude Stein comes to mind. Here the vocal part grows quite abstract, the piano more prominent. Despite a slow pace, the piece sustains its intensity through 14 minutes, suggesting, per Helgeson’s apt inspiration, Hermione’s years of obscurity.
From Norway to France
The Norwegian Hardanger fiddle with its under-the-fingerboard sympathetic strings creates a sound world beyond the reach of the standard violin. But Helgeson has transcribed for the latter instrument three 1977 performances by Torleiv Bolstad of traditional Hardanger fiddle repertoire. The three short pieces spotlight the virtuosity of violinist Modney (who goes by just one name) and the rhythmic interest, along with the charm, of this folk music. It’s much more energetic than the contemplative music on the rest of the album, so it was wise to intersperse the fiddle tunes between the other pieces.
“Through Glimpses of Unknowing” riffs on Debussy’s Preludes. Pianist Donald Berman creates reverberant clouds of sound across the whole range of the keyboard. But amid the deep atmospherics, I find myself asking, “To what end?” A firmer statement arises from “A Place Toward Other Places,” which uses the various tones, techniques, and spatial characteristics of the clarinet to conjure a collage of natural, urban, and otherworldly sounds. Warbles, sirens, synthesizer-like wobbles, dyads, and a mix of harsher and gentler timbres alternate to create an intriguing solo narrative performed with clarity and an eerie kind of soulfulness by Eric Umble.
As I Write This is an excellent sampling of Aaron Helgeson’s distinctive methods, wide-ranging inspirations, and thoughtful sensibility. It’s out now on New Focus Recordings and available at Bandcamp.
